Blend 3, SuperPreview (Web 3), Silverlight 3

After the first day of Microsoft’s MIX 09 we are left to explore all of the new tools and updates that have been released. After running the released demo’s, I am left with some thoughts. Oh, of course I shall point you to the downloads so you can have the full experience too.

Download Links:

Expression Blend 3 Download: Click Here!

SuperPreview Download: Click Here!

Now for a couple features that were announced. For starters, Silverlight Version 3 will have the be the ability to deploy your silverlight application directly to your client’s desktop, allowing your applicaiton to work in an offline fashion. Here is a screenshot of the new menu enabling this in Blend 3.

If you care to continue, another cool feature that jumped to my eyes is the support in Blend 3 to import Adobe Photoshop and Adobe Illustrator files. Now, after playing around with the tool, I can’t tell you it works 100% with all raster based images but its pretty darn good if you do it right.

The final little tool I found interesting will be included in Microsoft Web 3. It allows a web developer the ability to render pages across all browsers and inspect DOM elements to compare the differences. Currently this feature is released under its own standalone application by Microsoft, and you can’t click through your page links (includes IE7 and IE6 only).

Of course these tools are in Beta testing and development, lots of the features were not released. However, I assume we are all keeping our fingers crossed that Microsoft comes through with their promises in this upcoming releases of the Expression Suite and Visual Studio 10.

Photoshop, Batching Automation

One of the most annoying things to do in photoshop is manually edit twenty million images by hand over and over again. Luckily, in photoshop you can simply create an automation process by recording your steps, and replay this recording on multiple images using batching. Here are a couple simple steps on how to do this:

Make sure you have your actions window displayed:

Create a new folder for your custom actions:

Create a new recording and it should start on its own:

Do all of your editing, and click stop when you are done:

When you are done, navigate to the “File” menu and locate, Automate, Batch:

Select your Set (Folder You Created) then locate your Action, Select a Source Folder to perform action on:

Then select your destination, if you did not save your file during a recording you can specify, Folder, and Override Save As Function, to output to another location:

Click ok, and run your batch process.